April 10, 2006 | Monday

Writing headlines for search engines

By Jackie Danicki - Blogger in Marketing |News |Quotations |Search Engines |Search Expertise

This past weekend, the New York Times had a feature on how journalists and editors are now writing headlines to appeal to search engines, not to people. Blogger Clive Thompson writes about how Boing Boing, one of the most popular websites on the internet, attributes much of its success to its plainly descriptive headlines. Cory Doctorow, co-founder of Boing Boing, explained it thusly:

Many bloggers tend to write clever, wry, allusive heads to their blog posts. This is a big mistake, Cory said, because so many people use RSS readers to scan their favorite blogs. Many RSS readers are configured to display the headline to each blog posting and a bit of text; in some cases, they display only the headline, Cory noted. And many people have dozens of dozens of blogs in their RSS readers, which means they’re scanning hundreds or even thousands of headlines a day—and thus scanning them at lightning pace. If you write abstruse, punning headlines where the meaning isn’t immediately clear, the reader will never click on your entry. Boing Boing, in contrast, always writes simple, just-the-facts headlines—and this, Cory says, is one secret to the blog’s success.

Get that? The human readers of blogs are beginning to behave like bots, too: Quickly scanning for semantic meaning and ignoring everything else. So maybe optimizing for searchbots isn’t a bad idea—because you’ll also optimize for humanbots.

Boing Boing’s ‘band manager’ is none other than search guru John Battelle. Coincidence? Probably not.